Facebook Socializes the World's Video

Do you recall the memorable lines from The Social Network: 

Sean Parker:  You don’t even know what the thing is yet. How big it can get, how far it can go. This is no time to take your chips down. A million dollars isn’t cool, you know what’s cool? 
Eduardo Saverin:   [Sarcastically] You? 
Sean Parker:   A billion dollars.

My latest article is about Facebook’s plunge into video with Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Netflix’ Hastings stepping out arm in arm at Facebook's F8 conference last month:  

“There’s going to be an opportunity over the next five years or so,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has restated many times, “to pick any industry and rethink it in a social way.” Over 800 million users strong, and with a market cap estimated by some to be over $70 billion, Facebook
is well resourced to go where it wants.
...
So, VP EMEA Joanna Shields’ remarks to IBC delegates made perfect sense. Just two weeks before the annual F8 conference, Shields made Facebook’s direction explicit, declaring that the entire TV experience will soon be social by nature.

Her thesis, that television is better when it’s social, is based on the formula which was writ large on her PowerPoints: Social + TV = Better. Facebook’s first effort to apply that formula will be to enable ‘friends’ to contact each other and share what they’re watching. Together with its partner Netflix, Facebook sees this as new kind of viral boost to video consumption - one that Hastings said Zuckerberg envisioned doubling Netflix’s current 25 million members in the United States, Canada and Latin America.    (more ...)